ML1 pointed out an article about the change of management of the Arecibo Observatory. Cornell University, which has managed Arecibo since it opened, will no longer be managing the Observatory. A consortium of organizations will new be handling the management. We don't expect this to affect SETI@home much. It may mean changes to how observing is scheduled and how much observing time we receive per year. @SETIEric

Eric,
SETI@home just piggybacks to get its data. How automated is that process? From a manual and operational point of view, is there much labour or work involved for the Arecibo staff to keep the SETI antenna operating, packaging up the data and posting it to Berkeley, stuff like that?

What i'm asking is roughly how much additional cost/work is involved for the Arecibo staff to keep the SETI@home part of it running?

Or in theory, worst case scenario, could they "save money" by cutting the SETI@home part of the operation? Will SETI@home be viewed as an extra cost burden?

My guess is what comes next will likely be the usual game of politics. Still can't guess the outcome from the NSF and NASA funding/management jugglings but perhaps that is what has pulled in funding from Puerto Rico and also the greater involvement of their academia.

Hopefully, s@h will be seen as a greater benefit for science, publicity, and participant outreach far and above the small costs for handling disk packs to post the data back to Berkeley.

This may well all prove to be a very good and positive shake-up to breathe new life into operation of Arecibo.

Keep searchin',
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The S@H Science Status page explains how the data recorder works. Since it is always on, I suspect the only involvement of Arecibo staff is to check it once a day to make sure it is on, swap data drives when they get full, and send them back to Berkeley. Can't imagine how this would be a budget/funding issue.Donald
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